What made ribose the sugar of choice for life's code? Scientists at Scripps Research may have cracked a major part of this ...

In living organisms today, complex molecules like RNA and DNA are constructed with the help of enzymes. So how did these molecules form before life (and enzymes) existed? Why did some molecules end up ...

IT has previously been shown1,2 that when rat thymus cells are incubated in the presence of glucose labelled with carbon-14, the isotope is incorporated to a different extent in the ribose ...

DNA is fundamental to the biology of all life on Earth, but how many of us actually know what it is or what it's made of?

In natural life on Earth, the nucleic acids DNA and RNA are formed by sugar molecules — deoxyribose in DNA and ribose in RNA — that link to phosphates to form a backbone onto which the four ...

Laval taste neurons expressing members of Gr28 were activated by ribose and RNA (but not deoxyribose), and when Gr28 genes were transferred to sugar sensing taste neurons that don't normally ...

Parts of DNA can form in space. For the first time, scientists have made 2-deoxyribose, the sugar that makes up the backbone of DNA, under cosmic conditions in the lab by blasting ice with radiation.

It resembles its more famous cousins in almost every respect, except that it is based on a sugar called threose instead of the deoxyribose found in DNA and the ribose in RNA.

DNA uses deoxyribose sugars, while RNA uses ribose. With XNA, those sugars are replaced by a different sugar – one of 6 alternatives, including hexitol, threose, and arabinose.